Jane Austen & The First Gen Y

Are
the dilemmas of young people in 2000 so different from those of 1813?

Want to know what's really troubling Generation Y? Then crack open a pair of
books from 1813-14: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. You see, the most important thing that's wrong today
was wrong then, too.

Pride and Mansfield both describe the coming-of-age problems of
wealthy twenty-somethings and teenagers in rural England in the 1810s.
Like today's Generation Y Americans, they are fabulously wealthy, beyond
the dreams of most people who have ever walked the earth. Austen's Brits
have more servants, while Gen Y has telecommunications; but for both
groups, there's little material worry, and a great deal of leisure time.

Yet
all is not copasetic. In Austen's books, it is nearly impossible to trust
anyone over thirty. The five Bennet girls are the subject of Pride and
Prejudice. Their mother is an empty-headed chatterbox. She is just as
happy blabbering about (and temporarily ruining) one daughter's potential
marriage to a fine young man as she is making arrangements for another
daughter's wedding to an impecunious scoundrel.

The
negligent father has much more common sense, but he shares too little of
it with his children. Instead, he retreats into his library, smirking at
his wife's foolishness.

The
Bertram family of Mansfield Park is even worse. The mother is supremely
lazy. The live-in aunt spoils the two daughters, and turns them into
mean-spirited snobs with elevated ideas of their worth. The father — when
he's not away from home superintending his West Indian slave properties —
does nothing to control the aunt, but instead attempts to "balance" the
over-indulgent aunt by maintaining an attitude of formal severity toward
his two daughters, two sons, and live-in niece Fanny (the heroine).

The
rest of society is even less helpful to the young people. The ministers
(Mr. Collins in Pride and Mr. Grant in Mansfield) are
shallow greedheads. The most illustrious characters, at the top of the
social food chain, are particularly mean-spirited and self-centered; thus,
all but one of those associated with Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and the Admiral in Mansfield are highly damaged.

It
is through this moral wasteland that the young must travel, attempting to
create their own futures. Their peers, products of this opulent but
morally-empty society, tend to be charming while remaining thoroughly
callous.

The
results are predictably disastrous: a young man nearly kills himself with
drinking and carousing; a young girl convinces a contemptible liar to run
away with her; another girl marries a rich man whom she coldly despises,
and then is soon discovered in an adulterous liaison with an equally
unprincipled paramour.

Even the young people — who have, despite their dysfunctional families,
cultivated a good character — see their futures nearly destroyed through
critical misjudgments about prospective spouses.

Yet, while the judgment of the good young is often obscured by pride or
prejudice, these people do eventually succeed. They enter into marriages,
and manage to pull some (but not all) of their younger siblings out of
danger.

And
through all these troubles, toils, and snares, the parents making up the
rest of society are of essentially no help. They are too self-absorbed,
too passive, too busy with their own concerns to assist their children.
They may occasionally do something direct about misconduct (Mr. Bertram
shuts down the rehearsals of Lover's Vows in Mansfield; Mr.
Bennet searches London diligently for his slutty and missing daughter in
Pride) — but there is no adult who provides any long-term moral
guidance. Nor does any adult provide the most important kind of moral
leadership — by modeling a good life through a meaningful, loving
relationship with one's spouse.

Are
the dilemmas of young people in 2000 really so different from those of
1813? Television, a culture of vulgarity, and broken families have
aggravated problems, of course. Yet isn't the real tragedy found in the
fact that so many members of Generation Y are missing exactly what the
young people of Jane Austen's time were missing: an authentic relationship
with parents who know and care about their lives — and parents whose own
marriages provide a sound example for young people searching for their own
mates.

Today, authors like Dr. Laura Schlesinger offer a remedy. You do not have
to accept (and I certainly do not) everything that Dr. Laura says about
working mothers to agree with the subtitle of her new book, Parenthood
by Proxy: Don't Have Them If You Won't Raise Them. There are far too
many three-year-olds in institutional, heartless day care centers, and too
many seventeen-year-olds who never sit down to a family dinner, and who
almost never have five consecutive minutes of meaningful conversation with
a parent. The parents in Jane Austen's day did better on the family
dinners, but they too relied on servants, tutors, and other hired help to
do the very large share of child-raising.

Manners and clothing styles may change, but Miss Austen and Dr.
Schlesinger remind us that the fundamentals do not: Children need real
parents — not just people who supply genetic material and material
affluence.

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